


We are Waiting For a Train

by sadoeuphemist



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Derealization, Essays, Gen, Suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-22
Updated: 2018-01-22
Packaged: 2019-03-08 04:16:32
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 982
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13450359
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sadoeuphemist/pseuds/sadoeuphemist
Summary: "You're waiting for a train. A train that will take you far away. You know where you hope this train will take you, but you can't know for sure. Yet it doesn't matter! Now tell me why!"





	We are Waiting For a Train

Subways, rail transit, cars inching through traffic, pedicabs, taxis, motorcycles, Uber drivers, a city criss-crossed by a tangle of lines choking out the air, choking out the horizon. Go liminal. Float. This is an instance which will be over once we reach our destination, once the doors slide open, once the engines die, once we peel ourselves free from the sheer flood of humanity and reassert our individuality. No one likes being caught in traffic.

"You never really remember the beginning of a dream, do you?" says Cobb. "You always wind up right in the middle of what's going on."

"I guess, yeah," says Ariadne.

"So how did we end up here?"

Walkways, bicycles, strolls along the cobbled streets, buses, jitneys, intimate two-person car rides. Ariadne grasps for an answer and comes up with a blank. Without any pathways to tie it down, the city disintegrates into a slow-motion atmosphere of debris, a million fragmentary points all equidistant. Dreams lack transit, dreams lack forward momentum. This is unreal. How else could we have ended up here? 

Ride backwards, searching for a beginning. Even remembering the route to the restaurant wouldn't have proved anything - if this is how we got from point A to point B, then how did we get to point A to begin with? There's always something earlier, a series of precursor events stretching backwards until they blur at the limits of memory. Cobb awakes in an airplane. He is in an airport. He is at his house, about to meet his children. What happened in the interim, in that split-second of black between frames as the camera cuts to something new? How did he end up here? How are we sure that he's not still dreaming?

The world we've constructed for ourselves is unbearable. We are pressed into the service of vast corporations, we are separated by circumstance from our children. We are consumed by recurring patterns of regret. We seek escape. Transit. Purpose. We are going somewhere. We have somewhere to be. There is a direction to our lives, no matter how circuitous and oppressive they may seem. We board airplanes, trams, passenger cars, re-purposed army jeeps, and lulled by the cradle of motion, we let our minds wander. We drift off into unconsciousness.

We are waiting for a train.

Waking consciousness is held together by a connective tissue of lapses, losses of attention, moments where nothing happens. To remember everything, every single moment that led us to this point, every wandering thought and irritation, would be unbearable. Instead, we navigate our way by landmarks, memorable events, the roads between them blurring into abstraction, the gap between frames. We mark our lives by motion, _to_ somewhere, _from_ somewhere, elevating two arbitrary points and glossing over what happens in transit. We tell stories. We leave things out. That's a jump cut, an edit, a split-second of black - the formation of a narrative.

This is not the language of dreams. Dreams have no beginnings because they have no middles, punctuated only by the abrupt end of waking. Dreams are thoughtlessly egalitarian, proceeding from one event to another without worry of transition: _'We were all riding in my dad's motorcycle and the sidecar was huge, as big as a camper, and we were driving along a winding road at the edge of a cliff, and I was standing up and I could feel the wind and I was in my underwear and, and, and -'_ An undifferentiated series of 'ands' like a rock rolling down a cliff, no detail more or less important than any other. To ask 'how did we get here?' is to attempt to impose the logic of narrative, to look backwards and realize there's no trajectory that led us to this moment, just a jumbled sequence of semi-conscious events. Our waking mind edits, makes cuts, leaves things out. And then we go to sleep and all the raw material of our perceptions comes tumbling out.

Dreams are real. The stories we tell of them aren't.

There are no transitions in real life, just the undifferentiated continuum of existence. People die in car crashes returning home from the airport, petty, abrupt tragedies that would senselessly ruin a story. It's madness to jump off a ledge in an attempt to try and wake up from a dream. But in the waking world, people jump off buildings every day for less, not even believing in a world waiting on the other side. Dangling plot lines that never reach a resolution, lives that lurch into no purpose but disorder.

We lay our heads down on the tracks and we listen to the vibrations.

There's a sensation while traveling, being in transition, similar to but more extreme than _deja vu_. It's the sensation that this moment has already passed, and we're merely experiencing the memory of it. We have entered unreality, windows and windshield forming an embryonic cocoon, the outside world blurred by motion. The journey is a mere frame of blackness, edited out in post. We are already at work, already back home, already at our destination. Nothing we do in the interim matters. How did we end up here? How did it come to this? The world becomes unreal, unbearable, and the desire for motion resolves into its simplest form: a car crash, a derailment, a sinking ship, the straight line between the window ledge and the street. 

We'll crash, we tell ourselves, we're already dead, repeating it until we can almost see it happening. The steering wheel swings magnetic in our grip, veering towards tragedy, film unspooling. We are going to die. We are going to die. We are going to die. Metal sings. The car shudders into realization. The world disintegrates around us into a void of motion, glass fragments suspended in mid-air to form a sky of glittering purposeless stars, and we gasp and jolt upwards into dreaming.


End file.
